


Blind to his own brilliance

by orphan_account



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Blood, Feelings happen without either of them noticing, First Kiss, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Latent Force Sensitivity, M/M, Post-TLJ, Protective Hux, post-TFA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-16 18:35:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13642122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Upon suffering a life-threatening injury, Kylo discovers something about his General that will definitely lead to something more.Oh, and he also gets a kiss.





	Blind to his own brilliance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [solohux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/solohux/gifts).



> Written for [solohux](http://archiveofourown.org/users/solohux) in the Kylux Valentines Exchange of 2018 - enjoy!!

The snow is cold. The defeat from the girl is colder. Kylo’s pulse slows down with every breath, every trickle of blood from his wound is weaker. Warmth leaves him in crimson drops, one by one. He should get up. He should fight for his own life. But what sense if there to life without victory? Kylo’s life seems to be a line of failures, a continuous scramble for an inch forward only to fall a mile back. One failure more - a breath missed, a heartbeat skipped, blood gone still, body gone cold - shouldn’t mean much now. Maybe this one would finally bring him peace.

But peace was never something Kylo dealt to others while alive, so it’s only just when he’s denied it in his last moments.

There’s light coming through the falling tree trunks, a noise deeper and stronger than the howling of wind and cracking of the rocks: the roar of engines. Shadows fall long and shaky upon the snow, searching, closing on him like vultures on prey. Stormtroopers, carrying a stretcher. And behind them, their commander. Everything around him shakes and falls but Hux stands tall and proud.

Kylo wishes he wouldn't have to die with this shining example pushed in front of his eyes. He struggles to tell them to leave him alone. He’s done for. Medical treatment could mend his body but his mind has already made a decision.

There’s an edge of steel to Hux’s voice, a strange reverberance that resonates through Kylo’s skull and wraps itself around his core, grasping, pulling.

“You will live.”

He’s heard of this feeling, from theoretical point of view. He was never at the receiving end of it. The Force flows quiet and silent through Hux, no disturbance, no vortex. What’s more, even if he was a sensitive, Force compulsion works only on those weak of mind, and Kylo is anything but.

Yet he obeys. He lives.

 

*

 

The bacta wipes the worst of the damage from his body and most of those strange, suspended, dreadful moments from his memory. And the turmoil of the days that come makes him forget all about the rest.

The First Order loses terribly but the Resistance loses worse. For a while, there’s a push and pull on the fragile front of balance between the two forces, one side reaching for victory, then the other. But the Order is stronger. Over time, the war dwindles into occasional bursts, the Rebels turned into partizans, a nuisance that makes no change in the grand scheme of things. A sabotage here, an small insurgence there.

Hux, the Supreme Leader’s right hand, deals with them as they come. Time works for their cause. The good citizens of the Galaxy want, after all, nothing more than to live in stability. First Order can give them that. With time, the general public has no sympathy for ‘liberation’ that brings about only destruction of property and lives.

Hux’s presence in Kylo’s life is like a Kyber crystal that takes raw energy and focuses it into a sharp-edged blade of light. If chaos was a sea storm, Hux’s mind would be the lighthouse tower sending out a beacon light to direct others.

Kylo doesn’t question it. He’s conflict incarnate, he can’t even imagine what it is like to have a clear purpose, to feel a pull in only one direction, but if he can revel in it - be it second-hand - he takes what he can.

Hux probably still hates him, but he knows what’s best for the First Order. And so they work together towards their shared cause. For the first time in years, Kylo’s life resembles peace.

 

*

 

Of course, it’s then when the maybe last spasm of war catches them.

Maybe they’ve grown too complacent in their sense of security. They’re on the return journey from an inspection of a new reclam facility when their light cruiser is attacked, disabled and boarded. On any other day, Kylo alone would be enough to deal with the attackers - hells, he should be able to tear their old and rickety ship in half with just a thought. But Kylo can barely draw a breath. One lucky shot to the ship’s bridge has left him impaled on a broken console mounting, the sharp piece of metal jutting out below his collarbone.

It’s a fitting irony that after years of destroying ship equipment, one console would finally take a revenge on him. Kylo would laugh if he wasn’t coughing up blood.

Hux has dragged him out before he could be sucked out into the vacuum of space. They find shelter in a dead end of a corridor. On the dock levels, the fight breaks out, and from the sound of it it seems that their small unit of troopers will soon be eliminated, but Hux is staying at his side. Kylo doesn’t understand.

“Go,” he gurgles around the blood. “Take a shuttle, go–”

“I am not going anywhere. I’ve activated the distress call. Help will arrive soon. We just wait.” Hux wisely doesn’t try to remove the metal rod - it’s the only thing preventing Kylo from succumbing to rapid internal bleeding.

The boarding party is searching through their ship. They can hear them approaching. They know who they’re looking for.

“Somebody tipped them off,” Hux grits through clenched teeth. “I’ll find the traitor and tie him in front of the thermal cannon barrel, I swear–”

“Hux, it’s too late,” Kylo thinks. He can’t actually speak, he’s sure one of his lungs already collapsed. He tries to will the sound waves into existence with the Force but he’s too weak for that. But Hux seems to have heard anyway because he takes Kylo’s hand and squeezes it.

“We’ll survive this.”

_ You have to survive this _ , Kylo thinks. In his delirium, he imagines Hux can actually hear him.  _ You need to escape, the First Order needs a leader, you have to– _

“You still don’t understand, do you?” Hux gives a strange little laugh, more a shaky breath punched out of him, and then he leans over Kylo and kisses him. His lips come away smeared with blood.

There’s a gasp from around the corner. Kylo refocuses his dazed eyes behind Hux. Two Rebel scouts stand there, guns raised, frozen in a momentary surprise at the scene in front of them.

Hux scowls. His displeasure at having his first emotional moment in a decade interrupted is palpable in the air.

“What?” he snaps at them, his commanding tone as sharp as ever. “There’s nothing for you here to gape at like idiots.”

Impossibly, the pair of them stiffens even more. “There’s nothing for us here to gape at like idiots,” one of them repeats in a dull tone.

The wheezing gurgles of Kylo’s breaths stutter to a stop. For a moment, he can feel the time itself freeze. Hux stares. But - oh, he recovers quickly, and Kylo  _ loves  _ him.

“You will turn and go away. There’s no more survivors on this ship. Your information was false.”

Mechanically, the two Rebels confirm their instructions and walk away. Soon, Kylo and Hux can hear their boarding shuttle leaving the hangar.

They can’t hear their reinforcement Star Destroyer arriving on the scene but Kylo can feel the minds of the crew, and thrives on the sudden panic that overtakes the Rebels. Next to him, Hux also straightens his spine, a completely unconscious move. He  _ feels _ , Kylo realises, he feels even though he doesn’t know that he does. He samples the surge of satisfaction coming from the Star Destroyer after they destroyed the Rebel ship with one fatal shot, and watches the flicker of a smile on Hux’s bloodied lips.

He  _ felt  _ all of that. And he doesn’t have the faintest idea. Not when he’s smiling down at Kylo, completely oblivious to his own brilliance.

“That was a fine Force wizardry you pulled,” he says. Kylo can’t move but his urge to laugh was never stronger. Hux thinks Kylo did that - that he manipulated the Rebels into following Hux’s words!

Kylo mentally recounts all the little bits of extraordinary there are to Hux and can’t believe how he never noticed the clear picture they form together. Hux’s ability to inspire, to manipulate, to sway one person or a thousands of them to see things the way he does, to follow him to the death. The effortless obedience he establishes over his subordinates. The way Hux  _ heard _ Kylo’s thought. 

Also, the fact that Hux apparently  _cares_ for him. Kylo doesn't know what surprises him more. 

And then Hux is calling for a medical team, and Kylo is losing his consciousness, and all life-altering realisations will have to wait.

**Author's Note:**

> You can pester me to a follow-up to this on my Tumblr (to be edited after the reveals).


End file.
